[1]
college there are some machines, some desirable machines, that love to pretend
to do more than they really do. In a pursuit of ‘pataphysics – the science of
imaginary solutions – they never reveal their inner nature, their origins and
illusions, genuineness and fakeness. Simultaneously speculative, fictional and
accurately and efficiently productive, they navigate in the world of
Yestertomorrowday, happily and innocently, walking briskly over the mountain
of 20th-century rubbish. Using strange apparatuses, these
‘Alchimis(t/r/ick) machines symmetrically articulate different arrows of time
and layers of knowledge, but more specifically they negotiate the endless limit
of their own absurdity, where behavior that seems illogical is protocolized by
an extreme logic of emerging design and geometry, where input and output are
described by rules and protocols…

Neither a satire of the worlds,
a techno-pessimism nor a techno-derision, they are located at the limit – or
constitute the limit – between the territory of conventions, certainties and
stabilities where one can comfortably consider everything legitimated by an
order, or an intuition of an order, and all other territories, whether produced
by paranoia or fantasy or reported back by travelers…

In a casual and basic sense,
machines have always been associated with technicism and used as the extension
of the hand, through its replacement or improvement by accelerating its speed
and power to produce and transform. But it seems very naïve to reduce
machines to this first, obvious layer of their objective dimensions, in a purely
functional and "machinism" approach, exclusively limited to Cartesian
productive power, located in the visible spectrum of appearance and facts.
Because machines also simultaneously produce artifacts, assemblages,
multiplicity and desires and infiltrate the "raison d’être" of our own
body and mind in the relationship to our own biotopes.

[2]
Basically everywhere in nature, they are at the origin of all processes of
exchange, transactions of substances, entropy and vitalism.[3] Machines
are a paradigm for the body in the sense of its co-extensibility with nature,
through processes, protocols, apparatuses, where transitory and transactional
substances[4]
constitute and affect simultaneously all species, their identities, their "objectivized
and subjectivized" productions and their mutual relationships…

In this pursuit of a polyphonic
approach, we cannot overlook the concept of the "bachelor machine"

[5]
as an attempt to integrate "machinism" apparatuses into a
narrative of transaction and transmutation (in the alchemical sense).
Contradictorily, these ‘Alchimis(t/r/ick)-machines operateas direct
critique and denunciation of capitalist managerial reductionism, which replaced
uniqueness and rarity with a system of repetition and standardization, erasing
both the workers (when they are not becoming machines themselves[6])
and any singularities, any anomalies… providing products for a strategy of
servitude which combined mass production and the production of the alienation of
mass, as described by Walter Benjamin.[7]
In opposition to this predictable ONE WAY dependency, bachelor
machines simultaneously convey the fascination of this sophisticated human
construction, its eroticism, its barbarian eroticism,[8]
the "impulsion" and repulsion it generates, as a permanent schizophrenia
alternating between its simultaneous potential for production and for
destruction,[9]
for a permanent dispute between Eros and Tanatos. They are vectors of both
resistance and production, infiltrating the arrogance of the mainstream and
revealing its schizoid values… The same industrial system produces both
outcomes; their geneses are consubstantial, and their diametrically opposed
collateral effects depend mainly on our ability to see and make visible that
which lies beyond the mirror.

In the work of R&Sie(n),
‘Alchimis(t/r/ick) machines try to reveal these disturbances, or are
constitutive of them. The blurriness between what they are supposed to do,
as perfect alienated and domesticated creatures, and the anthropomorphic
psychology we intentionally project on them, creates a spectrum of potentiality,
both interpretative and productive, which is able to re-"scenarize’’ the
operating processes. A mind machine simultaneously transforms the real and our
perception of what we consider real. In this sense machines seem to be vectors
of narratives, generators of rumors, and at the same time directly operational,
with an accurate productive efficiency. These multiple disorders, this kind of
schizophrenia, could be considered a tool for reopening processes and
subjectivities, for re-"protocolizing’’ indeterminacy and uncertainties. Agents
of blur logic, of reactive and reprogrammable logic, the scenario created by and
through these "machinism" processes asymptotically touch their own
limits, revealing the fragile and movable border line between what seems to be,
what should be and what should have been. The creatures produced by this
machinism confront exterior forces, their ambivalence, their contingencies,
their instability… They allow us to "exercise our power, to be conscious of our
power, the consciousness of our power that is by the same token
self-consciousness, consciousness of our vulnerability in the face of the
enormity of this power."

They cross the line of logic and
walk in the fields of absurdity as an intentional value!

- For us and some others /
absurdity is a strategy to expand the territory of "what could be," and
simultaneously unbolt the locks on our mind and perception… and production…

- For all others / absurdity is
a strategy to qualify the limit of "what could not be" and disqualify everything
outside of the territory they previously defined.

Genetically Siamese and
consubstantial, it appears as a dysfunctional reflection in the mirror,
organizing the way "we and the others" frame conflicts arising precisely from
the state of the mirror, to quote Lacan

[11]
/ Where the perception of the unicity of our corporality, through the mirror, is
constructed in coincidence with the defragmentation of the perception of our
environment. The process of "reductionism" to One Body is the symmetrical
reflection of the One World, where all the complexities, the schizoid and
paranoid assemblages, early childhood’s sweet disruption of consistency, are
trapped in a univocal representation, framed and simplified. And consequently
all the alien fragments that cannot fit in this perfect and comfortable
representation of "INselves and OUTselves" are considered fatally flawed by
absurdity, weirdness and oddity in order to preserve the illusion of this
symmetrically operative but vain unicity. Beyond this point in childhood, we can
never again experience the taste of "cul-bite-bouche-poil-chatte[12]",
with this multiplicity of distance and territories (where animalism, animism,
acephalous bodies (CsO) and consciousness are interweaved with guilt-free
discovery…

"Let me see: four times five
is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is –oh dear! I
shall never get to twenty at that rate!" said Alice in the "The Pool
of Tears," but what appears odd is just a multiplication exercise using
different bases and positional numeral systems… The confusion created by Charles
Dodgson

[13]
arises contradictorily from a mathematic construction, not from triviality or
irony, and still less Alice’s childishness. The disqualification we carry out is
a strategy to avoid seeing that which cannot be, "ce qui n’a pas de raison
d’être," that which goes beyond our possible understanding and creates a "malentendu[14]"
between our vision of the world as we have we simplified it (state of the mirror
syndrome) and the contradictory complexity and "non sens" it generates as
a permanent shadow theatre.

Like Alice in Wonderland,
we have to confuse our little girl’s perception with such apparatuses of
"misunderstanding", stretching lines of subjectivization to organize the
physical perception of our paranoia. Absurd protocols seem simultaneously
markers and activators able to de-alienate the edges of the illusory "truth"
system, in order to re-invert the logic of meaning and turn it into a
multiple vanishing point… As we suppose the mirror is simultaneously a landscape
with a double Janus face, a simple glass over a brick wall, a mathematic and
geometric construction to extend light rays through the surface to trace the
discovery of an optical logic, or… the door to some parallel universe

Who said in the audience that we
have to choose one? Who said that? I have to know…

The history of science was an
ideal playground for this multiple disorder pathology… confronted by the denial
and disqualification of "that which cannot be," sometimes out of ignorance but
mainly because of reductionist conviction. The ideological dispute about the
theory of heliocentrism

[16]
could be one of the best paradigms for the fragile boundary between official
logic and infringement illogic, as the substrate, the loam for the absurd
substances that sprouted until they finally reframed the frontiers of our
knowledge… by metabolizing what was previously considered toxic to our framed
and "bourgeois"[17]
equilibrium.

‘Alchimis(t/r/ick) machines seek
to articulate things and minds, objective and narrative production, "machinism"
causalities and unpredictable dependences, to interrogate their "raison
d’être "and the eroticism of their transgression, weaving together the
malentendus and the illusions they generate, in a different arrow of
time:

"Here and now" as a live
transaction, "here and tomorrow" as an operative fictional scenario, "Elsewhere
and simultaneously" for

speculative and political
research... navigating between apparatuses of "animism, vitalism and mechanism".

The tools of mechanization drift
from a self-organized urbanism (an "architecture des humeurs")

[18]
to a stochastic machine with a predictable completion (Olzweg),[19]
from the "machinism" ghost of a wild DMZ forest (heshotmedown)[20]
to a paranoiac uranium laboratory (TbWnD),[21]
to a simple transportation machine, a stargate experiment(Broomwitch).[22]

Their ‘alchimis(trick) and skyzoid agendas are both
products and vectors of paranoia.

[1]
A reference to the Collège de 'pataphysique founded in 1948in
honor of Alfred Jarry. We could consider the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature
potentielle, Workshop of Potential Literature, whose members included the
mathematician François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau) the first branch of that
group, and the ‘Alchimis(trick) as a rotten branch of that branch.

[2]
A reference to the work of Ilya Prigogine, who considered human beings a
"mechanism" of exchanges, of shared substances IN and OUT and vice versa.

[3]
"Vitalism presumes a monadological rather than atomistic ontology. In Leibniz’s
‘monadaology’ all substances are different from one another, whereas its
opposite, Cartesian ‘atomism,’ presumes that matter is comprised of identical
parts (atoms)." Scott Lash.

[4]
"All bodily phenomena can be explained mechanically or by the corpuscular
philosophy." Leibniz, Letters to Arnauld.

[5]
Developed by a multitudes of artists, philosophers and writers such as Duchamp,
Poe, Kafka, Deleuze and even, subconsciously, Cervantes. The term "bachelor
machine" was first used by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 in connection with pieces
of work that would later be assembled in the Large Glass of 1915-1923. For
Deleuze and Guattari, the "bachelor machine" forms a knot
between desirable machine and the body without, to create a new myth which seems
to articulate Narcissus, Opheus and Sisiphus. It has been isolated by Michel
Carrouges (in his book Machines
ceìlibataires/ Arcanes, 1954)

[6]
As seen in the organization of Henry Ford’s Detroit factories (Fordism).

[7]
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1936.

[8]
From Poe’s "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Kafka’s "In the Penal Colony" to
Ballard’s Crash.

[9]
The latest subculture icon: Avatar, where the metempsychosis machine
saves the ecologically-balanced Ewya Kingdom from the caterpillar machine which
destroys the blue hobbits’ dreamtimes. The both are coming from the same "tea
pot".

[10]
Recorded lecture by Gilles Deleuze at the University of Paris-Vincennes in 1980.
The exercise of our power as Nietzsche and Deleuze understood it, as a gift, a
creation, and not the kind of dominance that they (the machines) could grant us.

[13]
The mathematician Charles Dodgson wrote under the name Lewis Carroll.

[14]
A malentendu is something between mishearing and misunderstanding.

[15]
In physics, quantum mechanics: Universes separated from each other by a single
quantum event.

[16]
From Ptolemy to Hipatia of Alexandria, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler to
Einstein.

[17]
In the Marxist sense, the social class that owned the means of production in the
19th century and now owns, through the media, culture, the means of
manipulating desires and subjectivities (Antonio Negri).

Machines
are always pretending to do more than what they were programmed to do. It’s
their nature.

Their behavior alternates phantasms,
frustrations and fears inspired by their own ability to break free and threaten
us.[1]

The blurriness between what they are
supposed to do, as perfect alienated and domesticated creatures, and the
anthropomorphic psychology we intentionally project on them, creates a spectrum
of potentiality, both interpretative and productive, which is able to re-“scenarize’’
the operating processes of the architectural field. Machines are a vector of
narration, generators of rumor, and at the same time directly operational, with
an accurate efficiency of production.

These multiple disorders, this kind
of schizophrenia, could be considered a tool for reopening processes and
subjectivities, for re-“protocolizing’’ indeterminacy and uncertainties. In this
way, they become agents of blur logic, of reactive and re-programmable logic.

As in Alice in Wonderland,
where Lewis Carroll used mathematics to confuse a little girl’s perception, such
apparatuses, including ‘’bachelor machines,”[2]stretch a line of subjectivization to organize repetitions and anomalies[3]using and developing paradoxes that are able to
re-complexify and de-alienate the edges of the truth system, in order to
re-invert the logic of meaning and turn it into a vanishing point…

7 6 10 5 5
8 9

It seems
to make strategic sense to evaluate architecture’s degree of reality on the
basis of its ability to tell stories and in this way enlarge the dimension of
its physicality. In a sense, we should consider the structure itself as a
fragment of a scenario, a MacGuffin, the point where
and from which speeches, strategies, scientific protocols and
power games articulate stories and agendas.

Misunderstandings,
in this sense, produce artefacts – in “the garden which forks nowhere’’ – and
apparatuses can be considered generators of ambiguities and knowledge where
non-shaping protocols, protocols of emergences, contingently reveal the
conditions of emission and are revealed by them, in a Situationist[4]
strategy.

The sevenBI[r]O-BO[o]Ts should be considered a
preliminary spectrum, from a speculative self-organized urbanism (Iveheardabout)[5]
to a digestive physiological experiment (thegardenofearthlydelights).[6]
Within these endpoints are a stochastic machine with a predictable uncompletion
(Olzweg),[7]
an industrial milling machine for anthroposophic transactions (waterflux),[8]
a hydroponic Hitchcockian ‘’Rear Windows’’, (I’mlostinParis), a standing
up machine, as a Darwinism evolution from a André Bloc house to its extension (broomwitch)[9]
and at last but not least, a pure chimera hybrid bio-robot – the mechanical
ghost of a wild forest where cold war degrades nature (heshotmedown).[10]

Their skyzoïd-machinism agendas are
both products and vectors of paranoia.[11]

Immersed in a vibrating[1]
stopped time, we follow time’s arrow – which since the 1960s has not been sure
exactly which way it’s going, vacillating between the moral conservatism of the
baby boomers and Gucci consumerist futurology.

Leaving
behind its Galilean scrutinizing of the future, an exploration of inaccessible
worlds that only Science (fiction) from the heights of its certitude
could drive, (science) fiction has slipped into the meanders of our
digital society. The false footsteps of Bibendum (the Michelin tire man) in the
dirty dust of the moon that day in July 1969 marked an end to our entropic
flights of fancy. The books of Stephenson, Gibson, Stirling and others, while
marketed as speculative fiction, were in fact live broadcasts, and the funhouse
mirror that the genre tended to create between the space of the imagination and
that of our daily lives expanded throughout a universe of plausabilities and
melted into the news, with all its social dimensions.

But the
main interest of this sudden in vivo matrix immersion lies in the anxieties it
provokes.

Instead
of Science (fiction) remaining a domain for positivist and determinist
propaganda, it should nourish the seeds of our own monstrosity – our own loss of
control amid indeterminism, chaos theory[2]
and biogenetics – as a force striking alliances with harpies and earthly
creatures, the Faustian Dark Side and the Sturm und Drang, against the
rationalist wigs and the works of the Hegelian spirit, and open up to a world
where even fears become fable, as lovely as they are carnal.[3]
We have to negotiate with the fold of the instant, the invagination of the
thought of the future, and live in a present that is like an asymptotic bend in
time, between Back to the Future and Tomorrow Now,[4]
between dream time and the day after.

Under
these paradoxical conditions where the notion and perception of time are crushed
on the surface of immediacy, how can we believe that architecture can only be
constituted by fossilized avatars, blind cadavers exquis of naïve and
progressist values,[5]
by quotational opportunism disguised as global entertainment?

To
reclaim the scenarios and substances that condition architecture and reveal the
contradictions and fantasies that drive our societies, we need, on the contrary,
to draw on this vibrating, disquieting and voluptuous temporality.[6]
Architecture is not something to be thought or produced for later, like the
standard bearer for a morality. It can only be negotiated live, in its
contingency on a situation and its solubility in a set of givens.

This
critical and territorialized attitude is in sharp contrast to macrocynical
flights of fancy (the market creates the form!) and their remake of
international architecture[7]
(New York, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, Singapore) and instead launches processes
that reactivate the concept of a throbbing,[8]
complex[9]
and unfinished[10]
“localism.”

Our
tools for the codification and transformation of territories work not through an
ideal projection but a local inventory,[11]
a mutant and tangible biotope, issued from the generalized bankruptcy of urban
thought[12]
and its deception. This ambiguity gives rise to our unstable and unique
scenarios.

The
folded rhizomes of Guattari/Deleuze were a point of fusion and arborescence to
attain an nth plateau,[13]
a terra incognita, to break out of the grip of those who declared that they had
discursive, pedagogic and linear authority. That made it possible for us to
escape from Promethean dreams, millenarian apostles and cynical moralists, and
walk gaily over the many and multiple dustbins of the last century, unburdened
of the confusion of progressist mythologies, in the voluptuousness of a
quotidian cataclysm.

(Science)
“fictional”[14]
architecture is not a cultural remake of the Altered
States[15]
variety for the elite. It has nothing to do with a nostalgic idealization of the
world in a museum soap bubble, nor a New Age utopia with its kindly moral
presuppositions.

Recognizing the new principles of reality, it is a
space of confrontation, ceaselessly investing itself in new procedures for the
reprogramming and rescripting[16]
of existence, here and now.

By
necessity, it confronts its emergence, its Gestalt, and can only be
negotiated in the visible spectrum. That is its political and operational
condition. It generates processes of transformation that take the risk of
critical positions and mutations,[17]
on the razor’s edge.

There
can be no pleasure in announcing the “infocalypse”. We can only harvest its
often strange fruits. The following projects are a few paradigms.

[1]
Stanley
Kubrick touched off the Big Bang, setting the clock back to zero in '67 /
ClockworkOrange and 2001 like opposite sides of the
same mirror / Dream Time and the Day After simultanously / NASA and CIA,
autistic hostages, two copulating Siamese twins. Because of or maybe thanks
to him, ever since we've been stuck in that double bill, a scratched record
stoptime without past or future, enjoying our stay between heaven and hell
in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

[2]
Over the course of time all systems become progressively disordered as they
approach their final state of total equilibrium (the second law of
thermodynamics). In order to track our environment, physical sciences born
out of the study of turbulence, vibration, disequilibria and probability
have taken the place of the linear sciences where things are viewed as
following a quantitative and determinist path.

[3]
One percent of the three thousand polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Svalbard
are hermaphrodites, with a vagina and a penis. The conditions for survival
at the North Pole, including Soviet nuclear waste materials carried by the
Arctic Stream and the carbon effluence of the Gulf Stream, have allowed us
to observe the first natural mutation.

[5]
How can we reconcile the need to save the Amazonian rainforest and at the
same time our fascination with the bulldozer (a sort of Caterpillar with
beetle pincers) that is cutting it down? This dual attitude protects us from
ecologist alibis, “primitivist” dreams of purity and of the Heimat,
as well as from becoming enslaved to the mechanisms of the tabula rasa.
Architecture consists of revealing these two contradictory dimensions, in
their constant tension.

[6]
“Yet this landscape of terror is also, as in Bosch, voluptuous and nearly
infinite in irony. Reminding us that hell is full of laughter, we could call
this cataclysm where everything bad is foretold in dark humour, a black
utopia.” Mike Davis, Dead City, The New Press, 2003.

[7]
One could suspect that the “Be global and fuck local” attitude is nothing
but a passport that allows countries that can afford to hire a Koolhaas or a
Nouvel to become integrated into the World Corp. But why not!? The vulgarity
lies in their duplicity. They may be in Lagos, at Prada or a certain
floating Pavilion, but they want to lecture us about political
consciousness.

[8]
Dust and pollution in Bangkok, mosquitoes and Nile River Virus in Trinidad,
“hairs in the Snake” and “bovine heat” in Evolène, the bush scorched by sun
in Soweto… these are the human and territorial raw materials that condition
the local scene. Contrary to what Plato says in

his
Parmenides, where he doesn’t bother to hide his distaste for what he
considers ignoble elements, the lowest layers of being – materials like hair
and dirt – are no less constitutive elements of urban economies, even if
they issue from bankruptcy of city planning

[9]
Complexity comes from the entropic dimension of a system, between chaos and
chance. Another aspect comes from its situation between two different and
even contradictory states. Complexity is not driven by autonomy but by
reactivity, and cannot taking into account to all that surrounds it. It is
in this sense that disturbances of identity, stealth and hybridization
become modes of operation. This is reflected in our own indecisiveness, our
inability to “choose between…” to “make to do with…”.

[10]
In this regard, consider how Jules Verne completed Edgar Alan Poe’s
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe’s last, enigmatic phrase leaves the
reader perplexed and frustrated: “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded
human figure, far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the
hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”
Afraid by this ghost, Jules Verne, in his sequel, Le Sphinx des Glaces
(The Sphinx of the Ice Fields), twenty years after, unfold this fiction:
“No! These were physical facts, not imaginary phenomena… This massive shape
(the shrouded figure) was nothing but a colossal animal… whose power
produced effects as natural as they were terrible.” Poe’s novella was
published in serial form purporting to be an authentic report from an
expedition to the South Pole that never actually took place. The piece is
disturbing, a source of endless questions, and prefigured Poe’s own death.
The fact that a half-century later Verne brought it back to life to bring
the story to an end reveals the oppositeness of the two men’s attitudes: the
former scripts and opens the narrative in its non-finitude, while the latter
plans and encloses it within the same operational modes as urban planners,
full of Fourièrist alibis,
Colbertist swindles and the predictions of "knowledgeable" people.

[11]
These two models of territorial intervention are diametrically opposed: one
employs reasoned and accepted Euclidean forms issued directly from geometric
abstraction (deconstructed or not), laid down like a conceptual or mental
grid over a particular place. The other is entirely different; it seeks to
exacerbate a response by extending the complexity of the site itself. One
dominates the territory in order to prove mankind’s domination of the
situation, the other folds back on itself, hollow, so as to let itself be
absorbed by the pre-existing equilibrium.

The first is a pure projection of the mind, the Hegelian
spirit, facilitating the consumption of concepts and images in an extension
of modernist ideals; the other – mutant, extracted from the previously
existing, more complex to obtain – in contrast suggests that, “In the
absence of ideas, we would have to observe.”

Like a chemist who has conducted an experiment in order to
reread it and understand it, this empirical and aleatory process is
constructed through induction and deduction. Depending on the project, the
skin of the photographic or cartographic image mutates and metamorphoses
through aspiration and extrusion, folding, heaving, pollution… The pixels,
fractal fragmentations of reality, are recomposed in a series of genetic
mutations. The context is no longer idealized, conceptualized or
historicized; it is the substratum of its own transformation. There is a
political difference. This mutant and thus imperfect dimension permits us a
glimpse of technology not as the fantasy of one more progressist assertion,
but as a tool of contextualization, hybridization and complexity. Beyond the
fascination for technological tools and factitious metamorphoses that they
engender, what concerns us is its operational function. It is no longer a
question of counterposing a project and its context, like two distinct
hypotheses, but of linking them through the very process of transformation.
The project no longer issues from an abstract projection, but from a
distortion.

[12]
On the contrary, we have to handle contradictions like that of the island of
Tuvalu in the South Pacific. Because of its low altitude and changes in the
oceanic water level (due to global warming), a plan for its evacuation has
formulated as an objective given.

[13]
“This is what the people of Stateless had in common: not merely the island
itself, but the first-hand knowledge that they stood on rock which the
founders had crystallized out of the ocean – and which was, forever,
dissolving again, only enduring through a process of constant repair.
Beneficent nature had nothing to do with it; conscious human effort, and
cooperation, had built Stateless… the balance could be disturbed in a
thousand ways…. All that elaborate machinery had to be monitored, had to be
understood. …It had one undeniable advantage over all the contrived
mythology of nationhood. It was true. Greg Egan, Distress, Harper
Prism, New York, 1995, pp. 171-172

[14]
Fiction differs from utopia in that it does not seek to be right. Why would
we seek to be right when there are so many people who carry the banner of
morality – they are legion, as dangerous and common as criminals.

[15]
A Ken Russell film where research into chemical hallucinogenics ends in a
polychrome and simian apotheosis.

[16]
“What’s
the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel
of a difference and the result slips out of control, shift the location for
action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between
societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their
development on planning.” Liam Gillick,“Should
the future help the past ?,” Five or Six Previsions, Lukas and
Stenberg, Ltd., New York, 2001

[17]
See R&Sie’s Aqua Alta 1.0 and 2.0… amid laguna pollution,
technological suspicion and hybrid mutation… in both cases, this is a
critique of relational mechanisms.

Delicious Decay

Zeynep Mennan

The
almost ecstatic energy and interest R&Sie is investing in decay and contextual
alienation in any project can be met on the critic’s side with the perverseness
of a construct such as freshness. Freshness has a double anchorage in physical
and perceptual realms. With respect to organic matter, it is immediately given
as a time-dependent construct, uncomfortably dwelling the very close vicinity of
degradation, decomposition and decay. The force of R&Sie’s architecture resides
in the endorsement of this fragile physicality, revealed and exploited as an
indication of vulnerability - of time, of matter, of architecture, and of a
situation’s pre-existence. This vulnerability can only be given in the visible,
in the changing gestalt of matter-form, in a formal play with empirical content
from which no purity is ever allowed to be extracted through abstraction,
projection or idealization. R&Sie deliberately abandons the pompous and heroic
role of the architect as the creator (demiourgos), transformed into that
of a process engineer, a form-perverter. Architecture builds out of all the
physiological processes that occur simultaneously on matter and form in regard
to their territorialization; form-making turns out into a form-perversion
process, into a hilarious and jubilant formal processing of putrescent and
rotting material, conveying a high sense of quality and appetite appeal, of
delicious decay, impelling for a new aesthetic and perceptual consumption. R&Sie
plays with the organic in the manner of a bio-entrepreneur, experimenting with
the chemical, physical biological and topological changes followed by changes in
the state and form of matter from a previous equilibrium. The way R&Sie
expresses, reveals and exploits changes in the sensory qualities of matter,
these physical transformations of a geography come then as another indication
for comprehending porosity and the vulnerable proximity and sensitivity of
freshness to decay.

The
tension of this oscillation echoes further the frenetic insistence on the here
and now, on the negotiation with the instant, on the refusal of any
historicisation in favor of the immediacy of an architectural production. This
production, which is not allowed to extend into any futuristic projection, makes
a playful refurbishing of the 20th century junkyard: Freshness starts
from the genuine use of decaying historical material, adding to its life-time
while keeping up the immediacy of the work. Immediacy appears then as a possible
freshness parameter to measure the deviation between a formal historical
repertoire, with its in-built gestalt, and its current perturbation by R&Sie in
both hilarious and disquieting fictions.

These
fictions, which the architects themselves call scenarios, are actually
reminiscent of the concept of play developed by Gadamer[i].
The work calls to play, the play-fiction is drawing the players into itself,
absorbing and dissolving their subjectivity. From this dissolution of
subjectivity, comes forth the notion of a soluble architecture and emerges the
tacit consciousness of already being a player. The architect is but one of the
players in this play. The play-fiction is non-linear, non-predictive and
non-purposive. In a way, it recalls the open scenarios of soap operas in which
the scenario unfolds with respect to the wishes and reactions of the spectators,
evolving in an indeterminate way that cannot be anticipated by its very authors.
The play-fiction produces an interactive design device, an
architect-player-citizen interface acting as a mode of operation negotiating
with our troubles, fears, fantasies and perversions while revealing and
confronting us to this very transaction. R&Sie delineates there an
ethical-political stance that looks forth for compelling play-fictions for the
design and dwelling of new territories. A genuine poetic expression unfolds
through the scenario and comes to update and expose the flaws and
totalitarianism of all utopia, of all social engineering, of all determinism.
The scenario acts as creative and critical compost in which resources,
materials, energies, sources, structures, territories, and species syncretise
with a deliberately non-anticipated outcome. In this un-founded and
non-hierarchical synergy melt down technological, aesthetic, social and
political layers, to which the natural and the artificial open simultaneously.
R&Sie invites all species, human as well as non-human, in an architecture
constantly including animals or insects as forgotten inhabitants of territories.
An architecture of hybridization playing with the real, the fictional and the
mythical opens before us a pagan atmosphere with a strange taste.

I had to admit defeat. Something wanted it that way. I, too, was
just an instrument. The world was nothing more than an infinite interweave of instruments.
The respite had only lasted for as long as the mirage that it was.Les Racines du Mal,
Maurice G. Dantec, Série Noire, 1995

Sites and territories nurture identities, preconditions and affects
that architecture and urbanism have continuously restrained and eradicated. The
architectural object, having claimed authority for four centuries1 has the
power of unparalleled destruction of modernity to maturity. But in so doing it signs its
own limits and end.

The numerous aesthetic orthodoxies born in the
antechamber of reason and the wastedumps of ideology have now not only become unworkable
but are also criminal in their discrepancy with society.

Judging each operation on the validity of hypotheses within an
enormous assortment of ever increasing facts and artefacts is not an easy task. Signs and
referents are not pre-given, like a symbolic reference, but have to be discovered in real
time, on the real site.

If architecture did not know or could not substitute for the modern
culture of breaking in a culture of place, more attentive to what it was bulldozing, it is
that the verse was already in the fruit. In short, a genetic error... The horizons of the
world of perception, of corporeality and of place have only too rarely been the mediums of
a production.

Territorialising2 architecture does not mean cloaking it
in the rags of a new fashion or style, which would be just as out of such and separate
from the styles and fashions already consumed. Territorialising architecture in order that
the place gains a social, cultural and aesthetic3 link means inserting it back
into what it might have been on the verge of destroying, and extracting the substance of
the construction from the landscape (whether urban or otherwise), whether a physical,
corporeal substance within it, or climates, materials, perceptions and affects.

This is not historical regression, nor modern projection, but an
attitude that affirms itself by what it doesnt belong to, outlined against a
razors edge, in permanent equilibrium. It is a process that is renewed at each new
place, allowing for an in-situ attitude rather than just another aesthetic code. From that
a radical displacement of our function can be born.

To identify that which characterises a place is already to interpret
it and to put forward a way of operating on it. But linking being to its ecosystem can
only save linking the body to the body of architecture.

This process of reactive mimesis is not a simulation of the
exquisite corpse game, a visual avatar, disappearing and camouflaging itself
with an ecological alibi. Its ability to take hold of a territory without subjugating it
depends on the unclear identity that develops within it, on the transformation it
operates, on the gap of its implementation, on the ambiguity of the network of
extraction/transformation that the materials have come from.

This antidote to the separated,4 autonomous body, this
live production process could not operate were it not nourished by these
active materials: there are the images of materials ... sight names them and the
hand knows them.5

In order that these barren propositions do not add,
subtract but rather extract, and in order that the object of architecture can spur on the
real, like a contorted alterity of the territory in abeyance, we should, perhaps, shift
the origins of architectural referents into a precondition that states there
is.

We had spent several years looking for the instrument that would
enable us to explore the minimal act, somewhere the not-much and the just enough, where
the territorial change stemming from architecture would be steeped in prior geographies,
where the development can work its way in, and embed itself in what it was supposed to
dominate, to exacerbate issues of mutation and identity.

We were after an instrument that would enable us to introduce
strategies of hybridisation and mimesis in the "here and now" of each particular
situation. In view of the many different manipulations of history, involving morality and
heritage alike, geography and cartography  and not the tracing, as Deleuze and
Guattari 6 remind us  have always seemed more operational to us.

But to contrast the already existing site with its future, in an
encounter between the image of the exposed context and the image (in photomontage) that
embraces the architectural project, like the demonstration of a processing economy, was
not enough for us. We were missing the grasp of the process, in the breakdown of
successive hypotheses.

Despite formulating hybridisation scenarios (Fresnoy, Magasins
Généraux, House in the Trees, Berlin, Sarcelles ), the medium was lacking. The
mutations not only never appeared in the movement that had given rise to them, but, even
more so, the documents, in the final analysis, could, by virtue of their isolation, be
re-interpreted as decontextualized artefacts.

The processes of distortion, originating from morphing, and here
presented by serial tapes or elsewhere on videotapes, stem from this dearth and open up a
field of possibilities. Over and above a fascination with the technological tool, and with
the contrived metamorphosis that it creates, we are exercised by its revelatory and
operational function.The more "deceptive" the morphed movement seems, the more
inert in its transformation, the more the urban and architectural project seems to be
dominated by the prior situation. The more the morphing can be read in its artifice, the
more the projection seems, this time around, to be deterritoralized. Unlike an instrument
of representation, morphing thus reveals the degree to which the hypotheses are
decontextualized, and in an on-going back-and-forth between deduction and induction, a
re-reading of the successive phases will validate or invalidate the relevance of the
choices, in a making with to do less strategy 7.It is no longer a matter of
contrasting the project with its context, like two distinct hypotheses, but of linking
them together by the actual transformation process.

The project is no longer the issue of an abstract projection, but of
a distortion of the real. The blank page and the empty screen cannot be.

This software calls for a body, a generic physical matrix.The skin 8
of the photographic, cartographic image is transformed and metamorphosed by aspiration
(Aqua Alta in Venice), by Scrambling (Farm in Swiss), by Overflow (Restaurant in Japan),
by Extrusion and Contraction (Tave House and Maido Museum in Reunion Island) by folding
(Soweto museum in South Africa), by growing Pilosity (Tower in Paris), by shearing
Territory (House Barak in France and Rotterdam urbanism)

And the pixels, fractal fragments of the real, are put back together
again in a series of genetic mutations. The context is no longer idealised, conceptualised
or historicised, it is rather an underlayer of its own transformation.

This is a political difference.

The virtual instrument paradoxically becomes a principle of
reality.

A few words of explanation :

Morphing lies at the root of a software which makes it
possible to merge image A with image B by means of a topological shift of salient dots.
With the "Warp" technique, which is a variant of this process, it is possible to
produce this alteration, but without being aware of the resulting B. Image A can thus be
easily manipulated, and distorted, when it comes into contact with a programme and a
scenario, but it cannot side-step its own matter, it own physicality, by resisting it. And
it is this amorphism that is involved here.

Presenting the conditions of a hybridisation and a
transformation that are paradoxically static and which, by virtue of the
mobility/immobility that they create, reveal at best the various issues of prior identity
and geography. It is tantamount to producing a critical state both on the
"territorial development" processes but also on the use and misuse of
technologies.

Doing nothing is to raise questions and problems, alike.
Doing things on the map, by way of these "@morphous Mutations", is like trying
to do things from the negative angle, without the preformatted and accepted skills. The
model already in place obliges us to switch our skill towards other arenas (social
mechanisms, political economics, and territorial challenges). This process thus opens up
areas of investigation likely to extricate us from the dictate of modern projection
(medium and alibi of 20th century architecture), which has muddled the programme with the
declaration of functions.To make the architectural object ambiguous, and to force it out
of the real, is to question our own perception 9.

Nothing seems more pertinent to me than an architecture
that straddles such ambiguities. The binary structures of the predominant thinking about
heritage/modernity and servility/domination have, happily, imploded. The transformations
of the body and its sexuality, using silicone and collagen, as a diametric opposite of the
Metropolis Cyber-Robot, are the lead-in to this. The contemporary prosthesis is made of
flesh, and the functional outgrowth made of artificial skin is re-formed.

The body is not denied, but exacerbated and
hypertrophied.Technology thus enables us, by way of these "@morphous Mutations",
to involve processes and write scripts which reactivate the concept of
"localism", not to serve up dishes again that have got cold, and museified
models, but a thrilling localism, made up of contradictions 10 and respect, and
reactive membranes, in an elastic topography.Identifying what characterises a place by
these new tools is already tantamount to putting forward a new operational
method.

1 Brunelleschis perspective geometry is responsible for
this, in the rationalisation of instruments of production and the domination of
architecture on the site. The rule of visual representation is thus substituted for
corporeal perceptions.

2 See the notion developed by Felix Guattari in his
Schizophrenia Analytic on ecosophy, that architecture has imploded and is
condemned to being pulled and torn in every direction.

3 In sense attributed to it by M Maffesoli, Du Temps des
tribus, 1988, History can promote a morale (a politics), the space will favour an
aesthetic and exude an ethics.

4 See Augustin Berques La Théorie du paysage en
France.

5 Gaston Bachelard, LEau et les rêves, 1942.

6 "The rhizome is quite different, map and not
tracing If there is a contrast between map and tracing, it is because the map in its
entirety is oriented towards an experiment to do with reality. The map does not reproduce
a subconscious that is closed in on itself, it constructs it." Gilles Deleuze, Félix
Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, Collection Critique, 1980.

8 "These tear the body within and seek a hole to escape
through, it throws its hands on to the body and they vibrate under the fingers ; it pushes
them towards the joints, towards the cavities of the belly and throat, it crushes them
there, its fist digging into the skin, which, bespattered with blood beneath, turns
cold." Pierre Guyotat, Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats, L'imaginaire, Gallimard,
1967.

9 L'Hiver de l'Amour/The Winter of Love, Musée d'Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, Paysage/Landscape nº2, R, DSV & Sie. P. An installation on the
stairs. The fitted carpet was laid, the height of the steps slightly altered, and the
carpet relaid. A study to do with the dissociation of the senses, between what was
perceived (the treads) and felt (a moving topography), March 1994.

10 "How to live by following  not without
fascination  the bulldozer's passage in the Amazonian forest and campaigning for its
protection while remaining on the razor's edge. It is with this terribly human
dimension that we must work. An admittedly schizophrenic attitude, but one which preserves
us from the snares of the clear conscience, environmental activism and destructive forms
of extremism." Lecture at the Pavilion de l'Arsenal, F. Roche, 1997,
Mini-PA.

It is not easy to grasp the architecture of R &
Sie... Rarely their projects appear as compact buildings. Often they disappear in their
own context, as if they tried to avoid to colonialise it with their objectivity. The
borders between figure and ground become fluid, uncertain where the building starts and
the context ends. This undifferenciability is no deficiency, but formulates the antithesis
to the modernistic ideology of the tabula rasa. Instead of breaking radically with the
past, R & Sie... virtually scan the environment for points of contact, in order to
propell them through a transformatory movement into a new constellation. Hence their own
intervention is less to be understood in terms of an implantation, but rather as a shift
and refinement of information already embedded in the context. While the generation of
progress in modernity was usually achieved by an annexation of the existing through a new
order (which equals a replacement of the real), this strategy of infiltration brings about
a blurring of the categories. The dialectics of old and new evaporate in a gradual
transformation, which permanently reorganises the environment and thereby creates
newness.

When R & Sie... was founded as a practice in the
late 1980s, the unease with modernity already pictured a fundamental scepticism of
architecture towards the project of the avantgarde. The concepts however, which were
introduced as alternatives, were nearly always of a retrogressive nature. The critical
regionalism of Kenneth Frampton demanded a move away from the norm of the international
style, pleading for a re-animation of historic references and local building culture
instead. Josef Kleihues, the organiser of the International Bauausstellung in 1986,
reduced the project of contemporary architecture alltogether to what he termed a
"Critical Reconstruction of the European City". All of a sudden, any connection
to the present seemed only possible by returning to traditional urban and architectural
models. History became an Über-Ich, which architecture had to subordinate itself to.

By contrast, R & Sie...s critical reading
of modernity calls for a transformative continuity to the existing; a continuity, which
gives way to a new notion of territory, whose genius loci ceases to be the
spiritualised extract of its historic past, but is constituted by the totality of its
material states. Yet soon it became clear, that architecture was lacking the necessary
techniques to open up this new territory. For if architectural plans define the space
within a building very well, the context seems to occur in them merely as an absent
projection surface, as a blank spot on a map, which seemingly becomes a place with
characteristics only by placing a building on it.

Thus it marked a paradigm shift, when architects
like Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache introduced computer aided design-techniques to
architecture during the mid-1990s. Animation software packages used in the film industry
such as Soft-Image (later Wavefront and Maya) opened up unknown possibilities to the
manipulation of space, resulting in an equal treatment of figure and ground as never
before. The binary opposition of existing context and a project yet to be developped gave
way to the inclusive notion of a territory with concrete characteristics 
flexibility, gravity, erosion, energy flow, circulation etc. Once animated to a three
dimensional virtual model, the digitised territory could be processed as a dynamic form.
As a result, the modification of its material parameters leads to a process-based mutation
of matter, which turns out to have little in common with the traditional logic of
sculptural space.

In their later work the pioneers of
computer-animated architecture, foremost Greg Lynn, paradoxically focused on designing the
architectural object only, in order to apply ever new topological geometries onto them.
For R & Sie... instead, the primary potential of animation does not lie in the
creation of a new formal vocabulary, but in the ability to map the characteristics of a
place and directly apply them to its own transformation. If the architecture of Gregg
Lynn, due to its formalist fixation on the object, ultimately reinforces the dialectics of
the building and its context, R & Sie... are using animation with the goal to
precisely abolish this dialectics.

Furthermore, their interest to interweave an
intervention with the found situation, is not limited to the mere materiality of space,
but includes its semantic and programistic dimension as well. A rather unusual
combination, as the concentration on the digital paridigm of architecture in
the 1990s was paralleled by a general aversion from working with philosophical,
political or historical systems of representation. Instead, an almost exclusive
investigation into material organisations- such as the choreography of vast
circulation of humans and goods  takes the place. A preoccupation, which in its last
consequence will lead to a semantic emptying of architecture.

In this respect too, R & Sie take a
different position to the mainstream of contemporary experimental architecture. In fact,
the semantic dimension of places does play an important part in their projects; however in
a way which is diametrically opposed to the contextualism of the 70s and 80s:
thus a place is no longer a topographical archive filled with embedded traces of the past,
wich are only waiting to be excavated as artefacts in the present. To R & Sie ,
territory and information fuse to the hybrid entity of a territorially embodied
information. Consequently the abstract idea of a place materializes to a multitude of
concrete places, in the same way that history as a given universal reality differentiates
into numerous stories.

These places are in fact charged stories, stories
very much in the cinematographic sense. In order to make these stories effective for an
architectural project, R & Sie introduce another cinematographic instrument: the
scenario, which in architecture proves to be just as useful a tool for structuring stories
in space and time. Yet, unlike in film, the scenario was never given a methodical place in
the design process of architecture. Hence the scenario must be virtually grafted into the
design process at some point, if you want to working with it. In the procedure of R &
Sie it is the program that acts as the secondary structure to implement the
scenario. This decision explains the enormous importance of the program in the
architecture of R & Sie  which again lets the practice stand out from the
mainstream of contemporary architecture, in which the program rarely plays a generative
role. After being ideologically hyped during the functionalist era, the program
degenerated soon to a minefield for architecture, which was carefully avoided (with only a
few exceptions like Bernard Tschumis early works such as the Manhattan Transcripts).
The architectural pragmatism of the present treats the program merely as an
extra-architectural affair, which is essentially put up with and more or less directly
extruded in space. To R & Sie though, the program represents an immanent
condition of architecture itself, a virtual building prefigured already in
extension and program, whos shadow already embraces the place and thus threatens to
vanish the latters own reservoir of stories. Evidently R & Sie are as sceptical
of this virtual tabula rasa as they are to its real pendant. Thus as much as the
architectural object is worked continuously into and extruded out of the territory, the
program too is negotiated intensely with the local condition of the place.

To R & Sie working the program is indeed a
constituent prerequisite of their architecture. Before unfolding a program in space, they
need to organise its relationship to the existing - which in many cases means re-writing
the program. In the case of their project "Maido" "Maido" (Ile de la
Réunion, 1995-96), the project essentially foresaw an exhibition building for
contemporary art to be built on the French colonial island at a height of 1500 meters
above sea level. The site was situated at a clearing in the forest, on which the building
was to be presented like a jewel. A program thus, which obviously had been imported from
far away to this extreme location, without the slightest consideration of its specific
characteristics. In order to put the building in relation to the conditions of the
tropical island, R & Sie disintegrated its monolithic volume into smaller
pavilions set away from the clearing closer to the edge of a nearby ravine. Nonetheless
the exhibition space does not limit itself to the pavilions for that matter, but encloses
the whole natural surroundings, which is cannibalised by their architecture. What comes
into being is a museum without the signs of a museum. A building, which exists without the
rhetoric of a building, as it occurs in the movement between the insides of the pavilions
and the outdoors of the surrounding nature in a way, which is most appropriate to the
location.

The same logic of a site specific re-organisation of
the program was used for the design of the Soweto Memorial Museum (Johannesburg, 1997).
The site of the project was a thoroughfaire in Soweto, where the child Hector Peterson was
shot dead in 1976 during a protest march against Apartheit and was buried there and then.
The program called for a memorial museum with lecturing halls and an exhibition about the
history of the townships to be erected at that very location. Yet on a site visit the
architects soon realised, that the aura of the place was still full of fear. It was highly
unlikely, that the public would be visiting the location in numbers, let alone spending
money there. In order to increase the attraction factor of the museum, R & Sie
tied the following condition to the continuation of their work: the archives about the
history of Soweto, which until that point were kept at several prestigious universities in
Johannesburg, had to be transferred to the location of the project. That way the
historians and researchers had to actually go and see the place, where that history had
actually happened, consuming things to eat and drink and maybe even spend a night their,
thus creating an economy.

In one of the most recent projects of the practice,
"Ectoplasma" (Lorient, 2001), the re-programmation of the program pushed to the
limits, thereby almost inverting the original vocation of the competition. The brief for
the project was to build a herbal museum reminiscent of the import and export trade of the
"Compagnie des Indes", which had been located in the britannic seaport in the
19th Century. But instead of losing themselves in the esoterics of scents and herbs, R
& Sie focused on the issue of colonialisation. The communally ordered
cultivation of a gone-by colonial culture back home revealed a genuinely absurd
dimension, which obviously had remained unaddressed by the original definition of the
project, only to be driven to the extreme by the project of R & Sie

For what their design in fact proposes is to
re-program the museum to a genetic laboratory, in which indian tea cultures are
genetically modified in order to sustain Brittanys climate. In a small park
surrounding the museum the genetically acclimatised indian tea is cultivated to be
consumed and tested by the visitors in a nearby pavilion. The colonial dispositive is
applied to its ancient players: while in the 19th century usually seeds of european plants
were taken overseas (causing the distinction of local vegetation), now the colonialised
world seeks roots in the highly subsidised agricultural landscape of France. Instead of
hiding colonialisation inside the sound walls of an ecological museum, R & Sie
create a dispositive by letting the visitor experience the effects of a re-bouncing
colonialisation for themselves.

With such interventions into the programmatic
definition of their projects, R & Sie reclaim a dimension for architecture,
which society has long taken away from it and passed on to external parties: commercial
project developers or institutional programmers, who often represent rather
particular interests. R & Sie however see themselves as advocates of a public
interest and understand architecture as negotiation of all culminating interests that are
part of a situation. By exceeding their authority in such a way R &
Sie provoke irritation in a society seemingly not prepared for such an active and
critical architecture. But it is exactly these irritations, which seem to form an inherent
part of the identity of the practice, whos name is only partly an anagram of its
members. Pronounced in French, the erratic abreviation reads as Héresie. The
three dots stand for the rest.

There was Dr. No
and Crab Key, Dr. Strangelove’s War Room, followed by Atlantis, Stromberg's
undersea headquarters, Blofeld’s lair inside a volcano and Hugo Drax's
laboratory. Fictional places designed for fictional characters that became
reality through their appearance on the world’s movie screens. Film sets
designed by Ken Adam who is hailed as one of the world’s greatest living
production designers.

Adams, a German
native, emigrated in 1934, when he was 13 years old, from Berlin to the U.K. to
continue his education. In the following years he became famous for his film
designs from Dr. Strangelove to Moonraker, from The Ipcress
File to The Madness of King George and he participated on no fewer
than eighty-eight film projects, seventy-five of which have been realised.

Ken Adam worked
as Production Designer on seven of the James Bond films, but his overall
contribution to the series is as important as that of any Actor, Director,
Composer or Technician and his unique and influential style assured the series
success in the early 1960's. It was his sketches that placed Blofeld’s lair in
You Only Live Twice inside an extinguished volcano, resulting in the
largest set ever built in Europe; that created the Liparus supertanker on
the world’s largest soundstage for The Spy Who Loved Me, and that
transformed existing locations to recreate eighteenth-century England in The
Madness of King George.

The exceptional
set that he designed for the first James Bond film ever, Dr. No¹,
prompted Stanley Kubrick to hire him on year later for Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It was that epic
architecture that Adam created in the 1960s and 1970s for Dr. Strangelove and
the Bond films that cemented his reputation. And in both, Dr. Strangelove and
the Bond films, Adam’s key design concern was to find an architectural
expression for the villain’s lair, imagining how such men, possessed by power
and madness, would choose and shape their environments.

Exotic locations
became an essential part of the Bond film formula. Pristine beaches, sparkling
oceans and islands, scenes of untouched natural environments in the Caribbean’s,
Asia and other places people generally consider as paradise. In such idyllic
settings, fantasies for most of his original audience being, stuck in small
apartments in the outskirts of London, Mexico or Bangkok, Adam situated the
villain’s hideout. As if finally the villain could be closer to paradise than
ordinary people. International travel was not commonplace in 1962 and for many
cinemagoers this was the first time they had been subjected to another culture
or seen the locations and designs pioneered by the Bond series. Even the office
of the opponents, the British secret service and its representatives, was given
small, mundane offices in grimy London, far away from the pleasures of an
untouched nature.

Adam often
placed his villains’ headquarters underground, underwater and hidden, without
leaving traces on the untouched nature. Framed by the 1960s Cold War, this
elaborately hidden world became an elegant metaphor for power and the hubristic
belief that the privileged could survive the disasters they initiated. From the
underground War Room in Dr. Strangelove, President Muffley can despatch
nuclear weapons and from Crab Key in the Caribbean, Dr. No can capture American
nuclear missiles and hold the world to ransom.

Adam’s design of
the villains’ lairs not only dealt with the question of survival but also with
that of lifestyle. His villains eschew the conservative style of the late 1950s
and early 1960s and instead look to the future and to the more distant past. The
impressive architecture was always slightly ahead of contemporary, with
futuristic decorations, surrounded with design and art work.

In the first
James Bond movie, Dr. No’s underground lair is a curious mixture of the
ultra-modern and the traditional, a look that established the pattern for the
inner sanctums Adam designed for other 007 adversaries. The high-tech aspect,
the elevators, the banks of gleaming equipment, the rockets ready for lift-off,
is the necessary prerequisite for advancing their plans of world domination and
was to become the blueprint for what was to follow.

Dr. No
takes on a sinister visual note when the shifty villain, the Professor Dent,
comes to Crab Key, where he is given an audience by the unseen Dr. No in a
large, bare room illuminated only by a circular skylight, barred with a huge
metal grille which cast an ominous shadow across the set. A cross between a
chapel and an abattoir, the room exudes pitiless terror, and the only living
thing it contains is a tarantula.

The War Room set of Dr.
Strangelove, while preposterous in its
extravagance, is also seriously imposing and reflects the awesomeness of the
tragic plot; the absurdity of the dialogue are a hysterically funny foil to the
sense of doom. The War Room is the American power elite’s equivalent of the
hideouts inhabited by Bond villains, and in effect the rumpus room that lies
behind the Palladian portico of Auric Goldfinger’s Kentucky farm and where
Goldfinger entertains the gangsters is a smaller, wood-panelled version of it.

One of the most
intense scenes of the film Goldfinger, was Bond's near death experience
strapped to the laser table. The huge set took up one entire stage at Pinewood
Studios and features the first on-screen use of a laser, representing the
curiosity of the villain in research and technology.

Surrounded by
their extraordinary environments, Dr. No, Goldfinger, Blofeld, Stromberg, Drax
and Dr. Strangelove are compelling figures in their respective movies. They are
exceptional men: intelligent, curious, and creative, often accompanied by
fantastic figures. While special agent 007 is only the servant of the
conservative force in power, ordered to oppress any changes and easily satisfied
with some comforts of life, the villain is restless and longing for knowledge
and power. It is the negotiation with the dark side, this questioning that gives
their characters depth.

In Dr. No, which was made in 1962
by Terence Young when the horrors of World War II had fresh resonance, the
eponymous villain bears the title of Doctor as a sign of knowledge and
questioning. And one year later, in 1963, Stanley Kubrick asked Ken Adam to work
with him on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb, where Dr. Strangelove, an Ex-Nazi, now working for the American
Government on a secret weapon program, is again bearing the title of a Doctor.

Both characters
draw on the long-established figure of the highly intelligent, but fanatic
scientist crossing the border to the dark side in his search for knowledge. In
ages of scepticism, men disowning religion have been impatient with all barriers
of convention, and have sought to satisfy their hunger of knowledge by reaching
for occult powers that seemed to lie beyond the ken of pedant authority.

This was an
impulse that the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe4,
always assailed by a sense of unfulfilled longing, felt in the ‘Age of
Enlightenment’, as his famous character Dr. Faust had in the ferment of the
Renaissance.

The title
character, Dr. Faust5
is a master of philosophy, law, medicine and theology. As a university teacher,
he feels imprisoned by the restricted world of the conventional science. In
spite of his continuing studies he can’t get the answers to the essential
questions of human life and the more he fails the more he is seduced by the
possibilities outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. Nor can he satisfy
his sensual desires. He represents the ceaseless striving of modern man to solve
the mysteries of energy, pleasure, and the creation of life.

When
Mephistopheles, the devil, approaches Faust, he offers Faust the fulfilment of
all his desires during his life in exchange for his soul after death. Faust is
easily attracted by the promise of understanding the mysteries of life and
accepts the wager with Mephistopheles, according to the previous wager between
the devil and the Lord God. The poet’s creation of Mephistopheles is the world’s
most convincing portrait of Satan and cynicism, scoffing, negation, is the
keystone of his intellectuality. The world he represents, his knowledge and his
intelligence is much more appealing than what Faust had ever tasted.

As the human
race develops an ever more complex network of scientific, religious, social and
moral guidelines, there are still no answers to the essential questions and we
are left alone with our existence. The established guidelines of the Cold War
era, the borders of the good and the dark sides, of familiar right and wrong
have been destroyed in the explosions of the World Trade Center and houses of
Baghdad. As people feel overwhelmed by new complexities, the influence of old
religions is rising again, while elsewhere capitalism has become a new powerful
religion. Both promise the answers to the mysteries of life.

For the men
disowning religion technologies and sciences are seen as the best sources of
hope for a better future. While continuing their search for knowledge, they are
constantly confronted with the common values, and constantly moving on the edge
to the dark side. So, in spite of their noble intentions, prepared Marie Curie
with her curiosity for radioactivity the path for Hiroshima and Chernobyl and
Alfred Nobel’s discovery of the dynamite indirectly let to the death of
thousands of people.

The growing
knowledge of men about the structure of DNA and the possibilities to modify and
change them and interfere in the creation of God will be the major issue of the
21st century. The possibilities of this technology are too promising to be
unexploited and in the same time they are raising questions we are not ready to
answer. While the national and international organisations are trying to create
rules to restraint its developments, their own scientists are already breaking
them under their orders in the search of knowledge and power.

Faust wasn’t able to resist the temptation and is finally
transforming himself under the influence of Mephistopheles and by deciding to
follow the promises of the dark side, he accepts the coming changes. Faust
becomes more powerful, but loses human feelings, his ability to love. Today we
are fascinated by the possibilities, while afraid of the consequences. The
possible changes can open the way to a new generation of humans, maybe more
powerful maybe less human. So who will set the moral guidelines of the future?
Who will decide which new technologies to pursue and what those decisions might
entail? And while we are thinking about the consequences and complaining loud
about the dangers, we are slowly accepting the coming changes. The negotiation
with the dark side is a daily task.

Notes:

¹ In the
first James Bond thriller, directed by Terence Young, British secret agent 007 –
assisted by the beautiful Honeychile Rider – investigates the nefarious
activities of the eponymous megalomaniac master criminal who operates from a
private island off the coast of Jamaica.

2
Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy turns on the decision of an insane US Air Force
general to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR. Despite the combined
efforts of Washington and Moscow, one American bomber gets through and triggers
the Soviets’ latest secret creation, a Doomsday machine.

3 Directed by Guy Hamilton, the third Bond movie (but
only Adam’s second) sets 007 on the trail of the gold-obsessed super-villain
Auric Goldfinger, whose ultimate objective is to clean out the American bullion
depository at Fort Knox.

4
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749 and died in
1832.

5 Faust – Part One is a tragedy, written by Goethe in the
18th century. He became famous in his twenties through the plays Goetz von
Berlichingen and Werther, a tragic romance that established him in the current
Sturm und Drang movement. But Faust - Part One is his masterpiece. He started
working on it in his early twenties, and finished, except for a few lines, in
1801, when he was fifty-one.

Bibliography:

Faust – Part One; written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;
published by Penguin Books in 1949; London

Moonraker, Strangelove and other celluloid dreams: the
visionary art of Ken Adam; edited by David Sylvester; published by the
Serpentine Gallery in 1999; London

For a long time the identity of the architect has suffered from
being bound up with certain technical skills, often associated with the ability to work
with the material ravages of social and economic crises. Now, due to their distrust of
ideologies, and under the probable influences of emerging preoccupations such as the
environment, cybernetics, and ever more restrictive constraints such as project economics,
some have begun to see their way through these conditions. With projects such as The
Unplug Tower in La Defense, and Maison Barak near Montpellier (currently under
construction), for twelve years, R&Sie.D/B:L has been elaborating works that combine
reflection on functionality, technological innovation and plastic creation as the critical
bases for architecture. The project underway in the Swiss village of Evolène presents a
particular concentration of these investigations, bringing together fundamentally separate
or even antithetical elements, multiple meanings and the hybridization of cultures and
usages lead to a complete rethinking of architectural applications.

The Tragedy of Human Frailty

Evolènes household beehives, wood piles and haystacks, the
local obsession with Herens cows, taxidermy and the painted wooden masks on the bushy
carnival scarecrow-like figures (draped in sheep, chamois and fox skin, with legs covered
in strips of sheets), are good indications of the preserved nature and activities of the
place. The crown of the Queen of the Cows goes to the most aggressive bovine at the annual
cow fights. The fostering of one kind of animality is accompanied by a more brutal, hidden
side, for instance when the "scarecrows" chase passersby down the street. The
development of tourism as well as the modernization of the village continue to be
accompanied by ancient and mysterious customs.

Witold Gombrowicz noted in his Journal, "I was walking
along a eucalyptus-lined lane when suddenly I noticed a cow behind a tree. I stopped and
our eyes met. Her cow-ness was a shock to my humanness. The moment during which our gazes
met was so intense that I felt confused in my humanity, confused as a member of the human
race. It was a strange sensation, and probably the first time I ever experienced anything
like shame at being a human face to face with an animal. I let her look at me and see
mewhich rendered us equalsat the same time I became an animal, but a strange,
even a sort of illicit animal.

The intersections are there. Human beings are not pure, and they are
constantly being overwhelmed by varieties of strangeness. Archaic embers glow beneath
modern sophistication, revealing strains of human frailty. While the village lives out its
human, animal, and natural autarkic desires, can the architect in Evolène exceed the role
of regional developmental planner? While Evolène creates its strange bestiary and elects
its Cow Queen, Europe discusses transparency and traceability of agricultural products.
Congenital defects, odors, paganism, and superstition characterize the rural worlds
domestication of the animal kingdom. Now it is confronted by a technocratic world seeking
to domesticate it in turn.

The contiguity of folklore and evolution, archaic practices and
modernity, humans and animals, is real. What can be done with this contamination?

The Tragedy of Ambiguity

François Roches intention is precisely to work with these so
called insurmountable cleavages, drawing forth both a view of the world and original
applications by playing with the complexity.

Roch developed a project for habitations to be transported to Mars
in collaboration with NASA engineers. The diagrams suggested a structure based on an
intestine-like coiling, whose outer skin, in frozen plastic, was similar to the inflatable
structures used by radical and Pop architects in the nineteen-sixties (notably the
pneumatic prostheses of Haus-Rucker-Co and Gunther Domengs Trigon of 1967).
For a tourist center in Japan (Shinano, 2000-01) he transforms the water vapor that
escapes from a dam into the constitutive element of the project, materialized by a sort of
skin that then links the opposing banks, and by modifying the lock release to form
sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent waves. For a childrens hospital in Paris
(2001), he conceived of fiberglass seaweed-seats in a variety of shapes, suspended
between floor and ceiling. They visually refer to the severity of the situation and its
necessary functions.

--Things are stuck together, combined and crossbred: They are sewn,
remodeled and reassembled for the Shinano project in Japan.

--Morphing and animation programs are used to create new kinds of
contiguous and coexisting spaces, such as the compactness versus dispersion of hybridized
forms at the Evolène Mutant Farm.

--The transfer of substances is actually juxtaposed with the purity
of materials at Aqua Alta 2.0s lagoon water bar (2000), where the water on
tap comes from the Venice Canal, after having been disinfected and cooled. But how
reliable is the filtration? Does the recycling and consuming of this water lead to new
degenerative effects?

--A microcosm pervades a macrocosm in the forest of seaweed-seats in
the hospital.

The distinction between project and context as two opposing
hypotheses is inoperative since, in the architects terms, "the two are linked
in the very process of transformation." Processes of distortion are operating
procedures in themselves; by connecting formerly separate entities, they create an
intensified space of becoming. "It is not movement from one point to the next, but a
distribution over open space with no arrivals and no departures. It is a site of
intensity, like the desert, the steppes, or the frozen tundra." Ambiguity
works.

Architecture can only begin after the multiplicity of meanings has
been assumed. The hidden foundation is revealed through the combination or articulation of
structures, the totality of the thing, the being as must happen with everything in
which all parts are mutually dependant.

The Tragedy of Revolution

Nature has systematically been considered in opposition to the
hygiene, progress and dominance of technology. The latter is seen as coming to structure
the chaos of the former. It is supposed to compensate for natures originary
inferiority, and to reverse entropic tendencies. As the expression of sophisticated
technical processes, architecture is supposed to contain and organize ways of life and
human occupations. And it often succeeds in separating humans from their primitive
tendencies. This evolution takes place simultaneously with the phases of capitalism.
"Capitalism can be seen as a sort of biology capable of creating its own destructive
viruses." Just as primitive ways of life can lead to total destruction or
eradication, the ultimate form of human evolution is a process of naturalization.
Technology hybridizes in accordance with this very logic. Probably the most disturbing
figure is the creature in the film Predator, a sort of invisible, amoral warrior,
the product of some unknown mutation, a consummate death machine.

But do mutations, transformations or hybridizations tend inevitably
towards loss and imperfection? The fear surrounding all questions connected with genetic
and other scientific experiments is symptomatic of the insecurity incited by these novel
phenomena. Mutations and hybridizations are experienced as taboo. Surely experiments in
which animal organs are grafted to humans or plants are augmented with genes from other
species inspire further experientialism with "human biology, metabolism and genetic
identity." The mythology is extensive. From the "humanimals" in the Island
of Doctor Moreau, to the half fleshhalf machine robots of Robocop and Terminator,
to the deformed and prostheticized and scarified bodies in Crash, hybridization is
presented first of all as destructive and degenerative, and as finally threatening to
sunder or destroy human civilization.

One can certainly buy into this apocalyptic and regressive
perspective. On the other hand putting hybridization to work in architecture engenders
"paradoxically static transformations that, by virtue of their mobility/immobility
better reveal basic problems of identity and geography, while at the same time questioning
the notion of regional development policies and the utilization and
rechanneling of technology."

Betting on the Tragedies

The contamination effects proposed by R&Sie.D/B:L are double. On
the human level, they point to the paradox of not wanting (or knowing how) to get free of
technology, while at the same time extending and augmenting the consequences (by both
raising the stakes on human demiurgic impulses, and emphasizing the fascination for
tools). They finally put an end to the discourse of separation (and its more or less
already foregone conclusions), replacing it with the fabrication of spaces that combine
invention and recycling, and that, treated like dissolved and linked images, enable us to
"infiltrate the folds of a situation," to "let ourselves be dominated by
the physical and chemical nature of a situation." Their architectural strategies thus
make clear the impossibility of either keeping to vertical, ascensional structurations of
space, or sealing space off. Architecture thus develops as successions of connected
horizontal levels which bring rise to deformations and folds. The aim is to
"articulate activities within a fluid, free space, with some concave
surfaces. . . whose basic preoccupation is with colonizing the landscape with certain
infiltration and distance-making arrangements that are not linked to strict geometric
layouts, but to freer and more deliberate configurations." And even more than this,
architecture will consist of a "multitude of embedded morphs," achieving
"4D architecture" by virtue of the fluidity and elasticity of movement and forms
(e.g., mineral, vegetable, liquid), and materials (e.g., Plexiglass, mesh, aluminum, sheet
metal and PVC).

This architecture constitutes a sort of bet on hypercomplexity (in
Edgar Morins sense) and contributes answers to the question, "Can we hope to
conceive of a society that would reverse or at least weaken principles of domination,
hierarchy and power, which could also collectively accomplish liberalisms,
libertarianisms, socialisms and communisms ideological and mythological
aspirations?" They would develop in relation to the triple tragedy outlined
above.

The Tragedy of Human Frailty: "A hypercomplex society can only
be extremely fragile."

The Tragedy of Ambiguity: "Anthropo-social reality requires
extremely complex responses, but is met only with simplification, Manichaeism, and
exorcism."

The Tragedy of Revolution: "Revolution is no longer a solution
available to us, but it should remain our problem."

This architecture will be able to respond to fears of disintegration
and total decomposition because only "hypercomplex means can compensate for fragility
and hypercomplexity."

The brief of the architecture of François
Roche is to play a part in its environment in a twofold way, involving mimesis and
recycling, extraction and transformation.

The work of R&Sie.D/B:L, which features in the FRAC Centre
collection in the form of two major projects (La Maison du Japon/Japan House, 1990, and La
Maison dans les arbres/The Tree House, 1994), "often embraces a parasitic form, a
non-form which seems to be made of poor materials" in its "drifting
architecture" (F. Migayrou).

Their projects question the explosion of the otherness of
architecture in relation to territory."Making with to do less" illustrates not a
strategy of withdrawal, but rather a refusal to erect architecure as something
supplementary, akin to a statue-like outgrowth. In a different way, architecture is
transformed into a complex enactment of territorial modelling processes : architecture is
not erected on the ground, but within a critical experiment that effects a change of
contextual parameters.

Thus it is that digitization and recourse to new technologies imply
an openness "to areas of investigation that will pluck us out of modern
"programming". ( ) Introducing new parameters such as the intensity of
flows, links, climates, proximities" (Lecture at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, 20 May
1997, Quelques nouvelles du front. Morphing-like digitized propositions  resembling
cross fading  set architecture in motion and make it perceptible in its
"amorphous" and "deceptive" mutations, prompting "scenarios of
distortion, substitution, hybridization, cloning, grafting and scarification" (F.
Roche).This scenario of hybridization is written by several hands, for everything here is
open to participation : with artists (collaboration with Piere Huyghe), architects (Venice
decompressed with Ammar Eloueini), and inhabitants--like the residents of Sarcelles who
were asked, in their "free time", to take part in a self-construction programme.

What is somewhat exceptional is that the human project, in all its
forms and with all its passions, is one with architecture, and the "deceptive"
tends to mean a dynamics of linkage, of the exchange which prevents solipsistic
regressions, by getting sophistic immobilities, which, in a nutshell, are afraid of the
"less", and the "deceptive", to ebb.

Is François Roche's approach Spinozist, developing, in the
extensive domain of architecture a kind of "plan of immanence", organized by
"the speed or slowness of metabolisms", combining "sociability and
community", "frozen catatonia and accelerated movement, elements that are not
formed, and affects that are not subjectivized" (Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie
pratique) ?

The subject has given way to individuated dynamics, and, here, the
word "mimesis", brandished in its literal sense by certain architects in the
form of a prosthetic and uncritical dimension, is, on the contrary, a method of invention
(how to produce transitivity), which demystifies the reifying inferences of those who
build buildings.

This is why there is cause to slip in between things, and make their
modal emergences well up, so as to exhume the sensorial nature of matter, the affects of
organisms, social, cultural and intellectual cross-fertilization.

For it is here that the corpus of architecture is no longer
inevitable, because it is transformed into its plural metamorphoses (urban natural,
social, individual, catastrophic and vitalist), incomplete in its temporal structure, a
flow affected by the host of "others", which ceaselessly move it. And move, too,
in the etymological sense of "put in motion".

Thirty years ago, following upon numerous studies of
Chicago and New York, Robert Venturis and Denise Scott Browns Learning from
Las Vegas considered what could be "learned" from the that citys
strips, signs and duck-shaped buildings. Today, confronted with other contemporary
preoccupations, a new question arises: What if the Evolène farm manifests the essential
attributes of contemporary habitation? Learning from Evolène would mean
considering the pure Swiss air, where banks, sanatoriums, globalization, the Davos Forum,
disposable Swatch watches, the La Roche empire of antibiotics, Milkathe Nestle cow,
and Novarits corn all flourish. It would also mean learning from the rustic country where
mountain landscapes and Saussurian geology were born in the nineteenth century, amid the
Rousseauist confederation of microagricultural concentrations and the seasonal movement of
livestock. A trip to the land of transgenic cowboys via Mars (and not the chocolate bar!).
. .

1. The Swiss Road Movie

Located several thousand kilometers from Paris, TX, Evolne.CH
is situated in a valley of the Valais canton. This is the world where the
"queens" of Herens cows are raised. Not far from Zermatt and Verbier, the
village of Evolène is above all known for its still authentic traditional mazot
living structures. Dried beef and ham, raclette and fondue are eaten, and people take
pride and enjoyment in drinking Valais chasselas wines, and warm white wine with
cinnamonsometimes in the agreeable company of Jean-Luc Godard or Irène Jacob, but
more often with Francis Reusser, Philippe Rahm or François Roche, architects who have
come here to test out the disturbing concept of the Mutant Farm. Disturbing? Well, readily
calling himself a techno-farmer, François Roche came to ratchet up the challenge of
exploring the complementarity of local, traditional ecosystems with hypermodernity (or
what the anthropologist Marc Augé calls supermodernity.) But what happens here is
far from the creation of Frankensteinian monsters made from man, beast and machine in a
hidden mountain laboratory, or the Nazi eugenics laboratories of Herr Doktor Mandel, or
Dr. Cronenbergs Canadian transgenic frogs. . . Nor can it be compared to a
sightseeing flight over the worlds last cuckoos nest, or a winter vacation on
the site of an Indian burial ground. Still, there are certain elective affinities with the
famous opening credits of The Shining. After driving along a highway deep in the
valley (which seconds as a landing strip for the Swiss Air Force!), the road movie ends
with a few asphalt covered twists and turns, the first few snowflakes, and check in at the
hotel. . .

2. Tradition vs. Modernity?

If there is one onto-epistemological lesson to be learned
from Evolène, it is the impossibility of separating the metonymic association of the
ecumenethe extent of land inhabited by humansfrom the biosphere. They contain
one another, share each others elements and are mutually interdependent. Current
techno-scientific and onto-anthropological debates assume that the final crisis of modern
paradigms and ideologies must be behind us, as they also turn their backs completely on
tradition and the past. After industrial revolutions, world wars, major political
conflicts, and ever-increasing pollution, certain entities stand out as contemporary
stigmata: AIDS, mad cow disease, battery-reared poultry factories, cloning and genetically
altered seeds. . . In other words, we are once again in the situation decried by Martin
Heidegger, the situation described in Build Live Think: a "housing crisis" but
whose dimensions far exceed the problems of post-war scarcities. . . With and against
Heidegger, and beyond debates concerning "the other nuclear technology" (genetic
mutations after Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, points
to the end of humanism in relation to a variety of mechanisms of the "domestication
of Being," from the sedentariness of livestock to education in the "human
park". . . José Bovés earthy common sense condemns the exploitation and
instrumentalization of the farmer, capitalistic hypercommercialization and animal-based
feeds, as he supports the traceability of edible products that reach the
marketplace.

The economist Jeremy Rifkin has mounted a continual attack on
the reduction of biodiversity, geo-economic "evidence" in the case for genetics
and the incessant and symbolic privitization of the planet: the public sectors
controlling Privatization of the Environment (water and air) and Priviatization of Life
(patents, cloning), promulgated by large agricultural and pharmaceutical concerns.
Meanwhile, the anthropologist Bruno Latour, has recently asked whether we have ever really
been modern at all.

3. Evolène, The Alternative Davos

While the old gray mares and young wolves at the recent and
nearby Davos Forum pondered the globalized eco-nomy, we found Evolène to be the site of
interrogation of that other domestic economy, the livable ecotechnology of the human
environment. If certain facts of Modernity are not condemned at Evolène, it is not in
order to avoid other "truths" inherited from tradition and left to the side by
Heidegger, such as the awareness that Being is always being a son or a daughter: Being is
always already being a successor. As paradoxical as this may seem in relation to the
contemporary mediatization of words, things and concepts (such as network, rhizome,
hybrid, mutant, etc.), what is most striking about the ideas revealed during this highly
instructive anthropolitical visit to Evolène is that the TechnoFarm does not consider
itself to be postmodern or hyper-ecologist. It tends to reveal economic, legislative and
ethical limits of modernity: from new beginnings to George Orwells Animal Farm, the
great farmyard ideologies are political trees hiding the forest of hormone-raised veal,
antibiotic fed chickens, and battery-reared pork. The moment of supermodernity has
certainly arrived. Now its time to check apprehensions about its industries,
techniques, and antitraditional nature, and to concentrate on the biospheric
"ecotechnonomy"the optimization by humans tending teleologically towards
the technical exploitation of the planet, along with the maintenance and transmission of
ways of life. This can be summed up in the notion of thinking globally, acting locally. .
.

4. Is Switzerland part of Europe?

The importance of the question of Switzerlands European
status does not relate to a well-guarded politico-cultural secret that may or may not be
revealed at the ballot box. It is raised, rather, to broach the problem of local/global
polarization against the background of issues concerning the European community in
relation to the the two "PACs," the Politique Agricole Commune and the Pacte
Civil de Solidarité. In other words, can a strong global perspective, combined with
local cartographies and civic community solidarity, lead to legislating workable rules and
exceptions concerning agriculture?

Pharmaceutical techofarming and the agrico-architectural
techno pharming of the Mutant Farm will certainly be null and void if certain conditions
cannot be met with down the river. Talking to farmers in Evolène seems to reveal that
conforming to laws on a variety of local and larger scales creates the kind of
disenchantment with the modern world that Max Weber indicated would occur with the
bureaucratization of commerce and human industry. Livestock breeders in Evolène have a
hard time accepting hygienic and sanitary regulations which they consider completely
inapplicable to their herds. Small scale livestock rearing of Herens cows in the Alps
bears no resemblance to the intensive milk-cow industries of Holland or Brussels, or even
the cows of St Gall. Evolène cows spend the warm half of the year roaming about in the
pure air and high open spaces of the Alps. Then they spend the winter in six- to eight-cow
barns, where the ratio of square footage to cow is as low as the animal body heat is high.
. .

In other words, whereas MVRDV architecturewhose
empoldered, "stacked nature" could be seen at the Dutch Pavilion of Hanover2000,
and in another project where the bovine population comes to graze beneath layered housing
balconiesis predominantly global, agricultural and quantitative, R,DSV&Sie.B/L
proposes qualitative and local technofarming, solutions.

5. An Ecosystematic Home Economy?

In the 1920s, the Russian Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky
conceived of the notion of biosphere, and the Swiss biologist Braun-Blanquet invented
phytosociology, which considers a cluster of plants as a single "community
organism." These provide rhizomatic and ecosystemic notions that readily apply to the
local typology of Evenolese farming. Like mixed-genre habitations elsewhere in the world,
where the basement is the barn and functions as the central heating element for the human
dwelling, the mazot and Evenolese farm comprise what we will call a traditional
ecotechnological bioplex, at once stationary and autonomous in winter, and open to
nomadic practices and engagement with larger territorial expanses in summer. Like a
beehive and its colony of bees (which are always among the "functional options"
of a mazot, with take off and landing strips on the façade!), the mountain habitation
closes in on itself in winter, to live off of the honey it produces independently of the
environment that constitutes its vast summer playing fields. The closed hivernal system
includes a hayloft, the barn, meat and natural fertilizer. Placed in sacks, dried meat is
hung on the first or second floors. Thus this kind of alpine, secular and local system can
be seen as an alternative model and schema to replace battery-reared meat and poultry, as
well as all the modernist and pseudo-altruistic "rabbit cages" of the
"great mass" denounced by Guy Debord. Supermodern psychogeography finds the
response to the housing crisis in this way of life, along with the Mutant Farms
territorial and global technological conception of the meaning of habitation. Living and
inhabiting are one and the same.

6. Terraformation, from Evolène to Venice to Mars

What is interesting to us about François Roches work
is its superposition of two points of view. It includes viable and immediately local
solutions to political, economic and territorial problems, and it offers an ecosystemic
habitat, not only as an autonomous but also as an iconic and supermodern ecosymbol. We
have tried to show the unity and complementarity of these two features within a conceptual
development with its own history, inscribed within the progression of
R,DSV&Sie.B/Ls work. The emergence of ecosystemic components within the
architecture itself can be described schematically by examining some of their recent
projects. Before this, the effects of other interests and readings were evident:
subsistence or parallel economies, and landscape, political, territorial and local
analyses.

Since the techno-farming project on a Dutch polder in
1998, these two projects are illustrative: The minimalist and demonstrative fountain at
the Venice Biennial (2000), presented an ecosystemic loop comprised of a food chain
between the summer passage of the vaporetto boats of the French Pavillion and the
absorption of the lagoons polluted water, rendered potable through simple
filtration. The second is a study for the French power company, EDF, also in 2000. The
project was for the construction of an office building that would be maximally independent
of exterior energy sources. But the most compelling project was the Mars initiative,
curated under Jan Arman (another Swiss). Both Mars and Evolène are projects of
"terraformation of the habitat."

François Roche makes use of the natural sciences as well as
genetics to create architectural projects that, rather than aiming for "harmony"
with surrounding contexts, gather their energy from gritty and essential aspects of the
hic
et nunc world. Unobfuscated by millennial anxieties, pollution and mutation are not
considered the enemy. They are concrete givens in the more physiological than visual
environments Roche produces.

The presentation of R&Sie.D/B:Ls projects that
François Roche made on January 5 in Evolène ranged from the flooded plains of Acquitaine
to the planet Mars. It amply demonstrated the extent of his commitment to challenging and
extending architectures prototypical domains. Razor sharp and sometimes
destabilizing, his "mutations @morphes" projects are always provocative. He
calls the processes underlying these materializations of ecological destabilizations and
mutations "ectoplasmics." Manipulations of grafting, piercing, morphing and
warping are used to test the limits within which a territory can remain integral to
itself, before a body will implode or fissure apart. The immutability of the vertical
distribution of animal and human domains was put into question in Evolène. Can cows and
humans live under one roof, for better or for worse? Such questions require intensive
scrutiny of the limitations of human adaptation and the currently evolving state of
humanity itself.

For Roche any ideology is unhealthy. Primed with readings of
Foucault on the question of power and the instrumentalization of discipline, especially in
architecture, Roche distrusts politicized exploitation, preferring the sort of fusional
strategies that are known in military parlance as strategies of deception. At the same
time, he despises any Manichaean approach. To his mind the opposition nature/culture is
worthless. There is no innocent savage or civilized culture, but the effective
consequences of potentialities of climactic, biological and geographical circumstances.
Roche takes the risk of combining these factors in ways that codified representations,
traditional narratives or myths cannot. The transgressive results are hybridized mutations
that are difficult to name. His take on geography enables a filtering out of the
"moral and sentimental" from physical phenomena. Thus the Combes plastics
industry in the Jura is as important as climate in the constitution of a landscape. Or, in
a project for an office building in La Defense, Roche and his team used computer programs
designed to calculate thermal emanations in nuclear power plants to devise a façade with
a coat of heat-exchanger strips precisely in order to avoid the electrical circuitry
supported by a nuclear lobby! Roche understands the paradoxes of ecological consciousness:
combating the destruction of the Amazonian rain forests does not disclude fascination with
Caterpillar tractors, essential elements of human activity and essential tools in the
forests destruction.

If Roche employs techniques that are usually associated with
super computers and computer modeling for the creation of synthetic images, it is not to
create illusions. These applications are not ends in themselves, because he combines the
virtual with elements of tangible reality for new investigations. The point is to reveal
what could not be discovered otherwise. Thus Japanese baths are housed in a building whose
shell is the material realization of a rivers flow. Still, Roche maintains a
critical stance in relation to such tools and deplores the way that computers become
instruments of institutionalization and standardization. (For instance, the conventional
employment of many hyper-realist video games, where the laws of gravity are the only
driving preoccupation behind the worlds they create, or the ideology of production
underlying many computer assisted drawing programs.) This is why he finds practical
applications for his work in the natural sciences. More like readings of things than
subjective formalizations, these projects reformulate physical principles as reminders of
natures inherent intelligence, including its "disruptive" mutations.
Didnt Roches interest in the way of life of the Inuit of Greenland, and
particularly their sleds comprised solely of frozen fish, lead to his adoption of an
analogous solution in the design of an exploratory space station for the planet Mars?
Because he "makes use of local givens without prejudice," he would cycle the
stations deep-frozen water supply as an oxygen source for the atmosphere, while
exploiting its hydrogen for energy. This example seems to derive from another principle,
based on consciousness of the finitude of terrestrial natural resources, "Making with
to do less" (Faire avec, pour faire moins), a semantic hybridization of Mies
van der Rohes "less is more."

[François] Mies van der Ro[c]he, as we might call this
playful spirit, is also very interested in the hybridizations of human identity,
considering videos of Michael Jacksons physical transformations as another
reference. A certain predilection for vitreous humor is also evident in his work, as in
the project for suctioning water out of the Venice Lagoon to serve in the rehabilitation
of a refrigerated storage depot as an architectural institute, or the stretching of a
gelatinous film over rivers that tend to flood. The attention to materials with unstable
qualities that change from solids to liquids to gases indicates fundamental aspects of his
research and work. Ambivalent definitions, fluctuating limits, osmosis, and the movements
and exchanges that comprise a bodys relation to its environment produce new
implications.

After the bloody conflicts undergone over the last century
and the effects of climatic and ecological disasters, Western societies are currently
endeavoring to come to terms with radical mutations to living conditions. Because the
effects and stakes of these problems affect everyone, cataclysmic perspectives and faith
in progress seem to have perennially been at odds, to influence predictable individual
perspectives. Still, some voices can be heard above these formatted platforms: Alexandr
Sokurov attends at the bedside of the twilight of cinema, and François Bon works the body
with language. In the realm of architecture, François Roche opens up unforeseen paths.
The physicality of the projects he presented tends to prove that there is always potential
in the unspeakable, even in the terror of transgression. Thus rather than ignoring the
dynamics of pollutions effects on a river, it will become a potential for
development. There are certainly risks: What do we see in the mirror held up to us by
Roches projects?

[6]
“ Yet the landscape of terror is also, as in Bosch, voluptuous and nearly
infinite in irony. Reminding us that hell is full of laughter, we could call
this cataclysm where everything bad is foretold in dark humor, a black
utopia ”, Mike Davis, in Dead City, The New Press, 2002.

[16]
“ What’s the scenario ? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add
a morsel of a difference and the result slip out of control, shift the
location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap
between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that
base their development on planning ”, Liam Gillick, “ Should the future help
the past ”, Five or six Prevision, Lukas & Sternberg, NY, 2001.